The Authentic Leader: Mastering Personal Leadership
Every leader needs specific skills in order to be successful in the role of inspiring and directing others. Sometimes, though, even with skills, the leader struggles. This program’s main objective is to ensure that each participant identifies his or her strengths and challenges as a leader, and discovers and decides what individual next steps are needed to achieve mastery of themselves. For those who want to know themselves better in order to create their own highly effective leadership style, this program provides the tools. The more authentic our leadership, the more effective our actions will be, and the more lasting our results.
Management Skills for New Leaders
Many organizations promote their leaders from within their companies; still others select leaders from outside. In both of these cases, the new leaders face challenges and opportunities: establishing open and direct communication with peers and employees, managing performance, coaching, staffing their units, and facilitating effective problem solving meetings. When presented with skills in handling these issues successfully, new leaders are able to affect results much more quickly and with more confidence than when left to learn on the job. This program ensures new leaders have practical, usable skills for handling the day-to-day issues they will face in a position of leadership.
The Skillful Leader
Individuals who have the responsibility for managing, supervising, or leading others need an essential set of skills. These skills allow leaders to effectively and appropriately respond to the performance challenges, which are inevitable to anyone in a position of leadership. Not only are these skills invaluable in leading others, they allow leaders to harness important energy necessary in dealing with customers and achieve high organizational standards. When an individual has these core skills, he or she is able to communicate well with employees, peers, superiors, vendors and customers.
Navigating the Storm: Dealing with Change and Uncertainty
Now more than ever, it's vital that we face change head-on and embrace it. But it's hard to stay positive and be adaptable in the face of day-to-day worries and job stress. This program will help employees navigate through the storm of change and uncertainty by providing practical advice and fresh perspectives. Areas to be explored include:
- Your Inner Game: Your thought process - do you control it or does it control you?
- Your Outer Game: What are you projecting to the outside world? Exploring the invisible power (and contagiousness) of non-verbal communication.
- Your Game Plan: Where do you go from here? Coming up with a specific plan to help get you pointed in the right direction.
Navigating the Storm can be offered as a lively keynote by one of our best-in-class motivational speakers, or in a workshop format.
Leading in Difficult Times (e-learning)
Today's leaders are bombarded with an unprecedented number of changes. When a challenge arises, people turn to their leaders for direction. Yet these leaders are often put in the position of delivering unpopular news to others. Leading in Difficult Times focuses on helping managers to support the needs of the businsess as well as the needs of employees.
By attending this program, leaders will learn to:- Predict and handle their own and others' reactions.
- Deliver tough (and sometimes unpopular) messages
- Use an inclusive decision-making process to gain buy-in
- Build team resilience
No travel time is required to complete this course! Sessions are delivered through an e-learning format, using video, conference calls, and webinars.
Inclusive Leadership
Designed to help leaders increase the level of employee involvement in their organizations. This program focuses on the interactions —the conversations—that build an inclusive workplace including: considering others’ points of view; enlisting support; adapting to others’ needs; fully utilizing people resources and facilitating difficult conversations.
Managing Other Managers
Managing Other Managers provides middle managers with the latest theory and practical application for creating empowered organizations at the middle management level. During the program, managers will have the opportunity to work an organization simulation, which, coupled with conceptual information on managing in the middle, is designed to practice and provide immediate reinforcement of the skills learned in the program. A personal feedback instrument, which gives participants a chance to assess their own strengths as managers, is also part of the program.
The Virtual Learner: Worldwide Relationship Management Skills for the Electronic Age
A combination of unprecedented advances in information technology and the realities of the global marketplace have made boundaries of time and space obsolete—while the need for rigorous relationship management is greater than ever. So how do you survive—let alone succeed and prevail? How do your reckon with the complexity and constancy of change? How do you create a workable and effective management “agenda” and “operating style” conducive to long-distance relationship management?
Coaching for Results
Managing and improving employee performance is one of the most critical and challenging responsibilities any manager has. Different from supervision, coaching requires a keen knowledge of individual employee skills or behavioral gaps and a commitment to work in partnership with the employee to strengthen performance. This course provides an opportunity for managers to assess their coaching and communication skills, and practice these skills using a case study.
The Virtual Learner: Worldwide Relationship Management Skills for the Electronic Age
A combination of unprecedented advances in information technology and the realities of the global marketplace have made boundaries of time and space obsolete—while the need for rigorous relationship management is greater than ever. So how do you survive—let alone succeed and prevail? How do your reckon with the complexity and constancy of change? How do you create a workable and effective management “agenda” and “operating style” conducive to long-distance relationship management?
Emotional Intelligence
A high impact course that focuses on the business importance of Emotional Intelligence.
Cross-Functional Skills: Making Matrixed Relationships Work
Much of the action in highly complex multi-functional global organizations is across traditional organizational boundaries. A new set of skills is needed to build and maintain matrixed relationships with people in different functions, in different businesses, and in different regions of the world. The Cross-Functional Skills Program gives people the competencies they need to create and sustain these lateral relationships in ways that enable the “right conversation about the right things”.
Influencing Without Authority
This half-day course is individuals who find themselves working on project teams or in matrix-based organizations where they do not have direct authority over others, and yet need to influence others to meet objectives. Topics include:
- Spheres of Influence: whom do you need to influence and why?
- Personal Influence Maps: clarifying goals and expectations
- Building Trust
- Influencing Conversation Models
Influencing for Results
Leaders must effectively handle interactions with people who have a variety of styles. While leaders may wish for commonality, and thus, consistency in the way they deal with others, this certainly is not the case. Seventy-five percent of the people leaders deal with is different in behavioral preferences than these leaders. And while there is no best style, interpersonal flexibility creates success in more effectively dealing with employees, peers, and customers. Leaders can have flexibility to tailor their speech, body language, and approach so that others more readily listen and accept their ideas. These leaders capitalize on interactions with others, especially in critical business situations—when selling, delivering performance feedback and providing customer service.
Presentation Mastery
Success depends upon how well you present yourself, your company, and your needs. Top-notch presentation skills give you confidence and also ensure that your audience is receiving the message you intend to send.
Polished Associates Mean Bigger Profits
A new associate is hired. Educated, articulate and ambitious. She has been given the opportunity for which she has worked hard. But she cannot win new business and struggles to establish rapport with clients. She tries but something is missing. Call it business savvy, charm, charisma. It’s the ability to communicate in a way in which the person with whom one is doing business feels as if he were the most important person in the world. It’s business etiquette.
Projecting Executive Presence
This program instructs participants on how to project professional presence in demeanor, gestures and image. Participants will learn how to exhibit self-assurance, competence, composure and authority when entering a room, participating in meetings/conventions and other group venues.
Making A Powerful First Impression
This program teaches the four ways for making a powerful first impression, the "real" definition of business casual, the ideal business image, the importance of follow-up and the art of correspondence. It also gives hi-tech etiquette tips when communicating via voice-mail and e-mail.
Meeting Management/ Strategic Facilitation
In today’s business, having the skills to effectively plan and facilitate group meetings to foster open and honest dialogue is a must. A meeting is not an end in itself, but a vehicle to help you reach a goal. Meetings can be an efficient and effective communication and planning vehicle, but only if the facilitator plans carefully and pays attention to issues prior to the meeting, meeting design, facilitation and evaluation, and subsequent follow-up for implementation of meeting outcomes. The solution is not fewer meetings, but more effective ones.
Organizational Savvy: Avoiding Political Blind Spots
Our clients tell us that this workshop is the only one if it’s kind that provides practical strategies and tactics for avoiding naiveté and for being more politically savvy. This 1-2 day workshop's fast-paced design uses case studies, dynamic presentations, skill practices, discussion and action-planning tools.
Business Cases Made Easy
An intensive 2 day workshop focused on how to develop clear, complete and concise business cases so that management can make informed “go/no go” decisions.
Performance Management
This course is intended for managers / supervisors who want to improve their skills in the area of Performance Management. Participants will learn how to motivate and encourage employees through effective goal and expectation setting as well as coaching, feedback and evaluation techniques.
Project Management Light
How to use project and resources wisely to accomplish set goals; how to identify for improvement, apply effective tools and techniques to better manage projects and resources.
Work/Life Balance
We used to be able to say that we have a "work life and a personal life". In fact, what is more accurate is that we have "one life and it is all very personal." In today's demanding world, how do you find that elusive place of balance given all the demands on your self and your time? This program will help you to explore your "work and personal life" to identify areas that are in balance and those that need some adjustment. We will cover specific strategies and approaches that can be taken to achieve more balance in your life.
CFO SPEAK© - Finance for Non-Financial Managers
Each class is interactive with practical exercises. Participants will be exposed to the actual financial performance of well known and/or local public companies to reinforce learning. Modules include Basic Finance, Budgeting, Financial Analysis
The Negotiation Skills Toolkit
This 1- or 2-day program provides participants with the confidence to conduct either a single negotiation event or long-cycle negotiations in complex organizational environments. It explores the entire negotiating process, typical negotiating strategies and tactics, as well as training on how to use analytical tools and techniques while planning and executing a negotiation.
The Organizational Survivor Workshop
For millions of working individuals developing the skillsets required to be effective in horizontally structured, team-based organizations, and finding ways to make themselves indispensable to their employers, has become a critical survival strategy. This workshop presents a clear, dynamic, databased model for success inside the new organization. It builds on the insights of those "people-who-still-have-jobs," as well as those of managers who cull through huge numbers of employees to pick the best and brightest to staff their downsized organizations. What has emerged is a blueprint for individual survival and success inside the new organization.
The Learning Organization: New-Paradigm Knowledge, Skills and Behaviors for the New Century
Actually, there is no such thing as a “learning organization”—unless the people who work within it have the mindset and the tools and the competencies to learn and grow from experience. So what does it take to become a “new-paradigm” thinker—what are the mindset basics we all need to meet the challenges and opportunities of the future—no matter what the future holds—so that we can each be value-adding contributors to the company’s current and future business goals and results? There is a body of discreet and distinct knowledge, skill and behavior that can serve people at all levels of organization to become “virtual” learners—the know-how to size up and seize upon the possibilities for personal and business growth and performance effectiveness.
Designing Organizations: Aligning Structures and Processes for Business Success
Organization design is a process unto itself. Once all the process mapping has been done, it's important to know how to structure the pieces form a more "macro" perspective to facilitate the work getting done and the hand-off's getting made as efficiently as possible. Designing Organizations gives management team leaders and internal staff resource people the concepts, tools and techniques they need to asses and decide upon design alternatives—and to implement changes necessary to assure that the "white spaces" don't get in the way of organization performance effectiveness.
Skills for Creating High-Performing Teams and Organizations
Skills for Creating High-Performing Teams and Organizations is a 1- to 1 ½ day work conference for members of new or in tact teams and business units who want to break through to a new sense of purpose and direction—and a new level of personal contribution and commitment to achieving results. Particularly suited to aligning energy and focus in the wake of organization change and restructuring, the work-conference format makes it possible for individuals and groups to create the agenda and preferred operating style for their own real-life performance management issues and to push through to a new definition of—and appreciation for— what it takes to be successful in today’s complex and challenging business environment.
FASTEAMS® - Team Learning Software
This revolutionary team performance system is built to extend the current boundaries of e learning. Its twenty-three online tools represent the accumulated best practices of over 350 teams. Empower your teams to benchmark their performance, track projects and solve common team problems 24 hours a day, seven days a week, without the need for a facilitator.
FASTEAMS® for Leaders
This eleven-module web-based course covers all facets of a team or project lifecycle. It provides team and project leaders with in-depth knowledge and application strategies for using the FASTEAMS® toolset. This software may be used in self-directed or instructor-led, face-to-face or distance learning formats.
Learning From the Quality Experience
There have been many successes in the implementation of Total Quality Management (TQM) in organizations large and small throughout the world. What has begun to emerge is a body of knowledge on what works and what doesn't in implementing total quality. These "lessons from life" have been summarized in this one-day conference, which gives participants a chance to examine their own current and potential future experience with the quality process.
Managing Change and Innovation
The single most “constant” in our organizational lives these days is change. And for companies to remain competitive, they must learn to manage not only change—but they must also continue to find ways to innovate—externally, through new products and approaches to the marketplace as well as internally, through more creative management practices and processes and the use of information technology. Fortunately, a growing body of knowledge is available to us regarding how best to deal with the dynamics of organization change and to create a culture of innovation for the future. This program helps broaden the understanding and awareness of “having the right conversation” and “doing the right things right” in helping to create the circumstances in which people and organizations can embrace change, prosper through innovation and become more truly high-performing and results-driven.
Shaping Up: A Work Process for Organizational Streamlining and Simplification
When organizations are resized, very often the people go away—but the work does not. Shaping Up is a work process that helps work groups deal with the aftermath of resizing by realistically assessing workloads and re-aligning work practices accordingly. Based on GE's highly successful Workout model, Shaping Up provides the opportunity for an intact work group to eliminate or modify how work gets done in the organization. By making it possible to include people from all levels of organization, Shaping Up is also a vehicle for involvement, participation and cultural change—giving everyone a chance to take responsibility for process streamlining and work simplification—and breaking through the kind of ineffective and inefficient” organizational gridlock" that often accompanies organization restructuring.
Managing with Business Acumen
What drives business to higher levels of profitability? Business Acumen! This interactive, one-day program is built around the fundamentals of smart business decision-making, understanding the corporate environment and understanding the financial impact of decision-making in the context of our company’s financial drivers.
The Practical Thinker: Problem-Solving Skills for Everyday Use
“Common sense” and “smarts” aren’t what they use to be. We were once able to apply the former with ease and point to countless examples of the latter. But, in the business world of today, the deluge of information is too great, the complexities too deep and the pace of change too fast to leave us much confidence in our competence. We must learn how to sharpen our ability to diagnose organization problems and be a step ahead of emerging opportunities—tapping into both our intellect and our intuition in new ways to achieve our organization performance objectives as well as our personal goals. We must learn to act responsibly and responsively in our everyday choice-making, using information well and managing relationships wisely. The Practical Thinker is a highly innovative work conference which provides the fundamental knowledge, tools and techniques to put our minds to good use—to meet our everyday challenges in creative, satisfying, and effective ways.
Interpersonal Skills Laboratory (ISL)
A 3-4 day work conference where people learn how to increase their interpersonal competence and how to create high performance work groups—the skills needed to improve the performance effectiveness of people and teams. ISL examines interpersonal effectiveness in theory and practice and provides opportunities to apply learnings and insights in a small-group "learning laboratory" setting. A unique feature of the ISL program is a confidential pre-work questionnaire the Interpersonal and Group Skills Profile which is completed by the participant's supervisors, peers, and associates, compiled anonymously in a detailed feedback report, and presented to participants during the program. Such specific feedback regarding interpersonal effectiveness as perceived by these key people on the job is invaluable in helping participants understand and apply their learnings in the program to their workplace.
Strategic Planning: A Roadmap for Everyday Use
Is not so much a blueprint for tomorrow as it is a roadmap for today. In fact, if we’re not dedicating at least 20% of our time on a daily basis to strategic vs. tactical thinking, it’s likely that we are leaving the future to random chance. This Strategic Planning program provides a structure, a process and a language for the right approach to our planning work—both for today and for tomorrow. A set of methods, tools and techniques are offered up to guide the way, step by step, from initial strategy formulation, through design, and into final implementation.
From Conflict to Collaboration: Resolution Strategies
All individuals within organizations experience conflict; this is not unusual. Leaders need to learn how to handle conflict in ways that encourage problem solving and solutions in which all parties’ needs are met. In this workshop, participants will learn how to handle conflict in productive ways that encourage problem solving and result in “win/win” solutions. They’ll learn how to resolve conflict by using a variety of tools and techniques to understand the needs of others, advocate for their own position and find solutions that meet the needs of all involved.
Coming to Terms
A Relationship Management Work Process was created in response to the need of people in organizations to learn how to structure and facilitate the right quality of conversation to get their relationships back on track. Participants will learn: a language: to provide the basic vocabulary for the conversations; a process: to gather information, to provide the structure of the conversations; a coaching process: to provide the skills and objectivity needed to assure that the issues are fully and constructively examined, that the work is done in the spirit of fact-finding and not fault-finding, and that solutions are sought with a sense of mutual gain, involvement and commitment to shared responsibility for the results
Crisis Capability for Leaders: Confrontation Skills
When people have a pattern of making agreements, are fully willing and able to hold them up, and yet do not deliver on the agreements, leaders need to confront the behavior. This correction needs to be made in order for teams to function effectively and fairly. Without the correction, individuals who have made agreements and not kept them lose interest in future agreements and wonder about their commitment to the team.
Collaborative Communications
Participants will learn how to improve their communication skills to increase clarity, organization and desired outcomes. Focus will be on a variety of communication forms including face-to-face, written, telephone, electronic mail, video conferencing and meetings. They will learn how to select the form of communication based on message, audience and desired outcomes. Program will also include tips on presentation of materials, provide discussion and practice as well as self-evaluation and action planning to incorporate the new skills in the workplace.
Innovators
A 1-2 day workshop that uses a combination of analytical and creative techniques to develop a systematic innovation process resulting in improved products, processes, and practices. The complete Innovators workshop is presented in four modules – Innovating, Planning, Presenting Innovative Ideas and Building an Innovative Organization.
Strengthening Customer Relationships
Enhances the communications skills crucial to increasing co-worker and customer relationships. Focused on developing a conscious and systematic approach for handling interpersonal interactions, this program is applicable for employees dealing with both internal and external customers.
Dealing with Those Who Are Experiencing Loss and Grief
This workshop is an interactive session geared to participants who deal with customers who have experienced a significant loss. The experiential portions are customized to the specific challenges: business functions such as insurance and legalities, phone support, face-to-face or group counseling, or co-workers.
Write to the point: A Workshop
Would you like your managers and professionals to increase the impact of their messages? This program presents simple, practical guidelines for communicating ideas more effectively in writing.